Brett Hull: Stealth Bomber

Published: December 8, 1991

(Page 3 of 5)

Bobby Hull's memory tape ends, the images dissolving at the point when he disappeared from his younger children's lives in the aftermath of the bitter divorce 11 years ago from his wife, Joanne. The headlines in Canada's newspapers screamed of physical abuse, huge monetary awards, claims and counterclaims of everything from infidelity to bankruptcy. Bobby Hull, the mythic figure in Canada's national sport, who had so long distinguished himself as one of the game's most charismatic ambassadors, was portrayed as a man out of control.

"He was an abusive personality," says Hull's former wife, Joanne Robinson, who moved her four sons and one daughter from Winnipeg to Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 and remarried in 1982. "He was an abusive husband, physically and mentally. It pains me to talk about it all again, and it's a shame that Brett should have to recount it all, too. That child is one of the world's special creatures, and the force of his personality was, in many ways, the glue that held our family together. He's made his peace with his dad. That he could forgive him is a blessing. That he could forget, I think, would be asking too much."

Bobby Hull was born in Pointe Anne, Ontario, "a town," he says, "of 500 people and 600 dogs." Hull's father -- known as the Blond Flash during his brief minor-league career -- was a laborer at the Canada Cement Company Plant No. 5. Bobby, the eldest boy in a family of 11 children, spent his days breaking pitchforks in bales of hay and hockey sticks on the ice, developing some of the most famously cabled arms in hockey history.

"I'd wake up early, build the fire in the kitchen and go out to the rink to bang pucks off the boards for hours," Hull recalls. "The neighbors used to beg my father to make me wait at least till 7 A.M. before doing it.

"As a kid, I never walked from here to there, I didn't trot from here to there. I ran. And I couldn't wait for winter. My father would sometimes find me in the heat of summer standing in the house with my equipment on, sweating crazily. I just wanted the feel of it. Hockey became an obsession."

Hull, whose often random experimentation with slap shots unleashed from curved rather than straightedge stick blades both traumatized and revolutionized the sport, crashed and burned his way through 16 N.H.L. seasons. With a fusion of indefatigability and quiet malevolence, Hull scored a career total of 610 goals, notching more than 50 in a season five times. "I played all over the ice," he says. "I went and got the puck. I tried to be constructive. I can't fathom results coming of anything but hard work."

Full of grit and yet capable of astonishing grace, Bobby Hull was a swift-skating left wing who manufactured goals with his sheer mania for work, as well as his volcanic blast of a slap shot. And if he lost the majority of his teeth plowing through defenses, he never lost face. One of the enduring pictures of the Golden Jet, as he was known, showed Hull, his jaw recently wired shut to correct a break, refusing to surrender in a brutally one-sided fight with Montreal's John Ferguson, a primitive player who did most of his N.H.L. scoring with his right hand. Blood ran in rivers off Hull's face, and yet he stood in and hung on.

Joanne McKay, a figure skater in the nightly show at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago in the 60's, couldn't help falling for Bobby Hull when he suddenly appeared, his face stitched, his clothes stylish, one afternoon at practice and bent to hand her a skate guard.

"He was handsome, dashing, charismatic," she remembers.

But for Brett, Bobby was an ordinary father, worthy of worship but also a source of worry, gone too much of the time and often too tough when he was around. Bobby recalls sitting on 3-year-old Brett's chest, forcibly lacing the first pair of skates on his frightened son and laughing at the boy's frantic flops to safety.

"I find it hard to believe anyone has incredibly vivid memories from before the age of 5 or 6," Brett says now. "I don't have any recollections of staring through smoke at Chicago Stadium and seeing him kill someone with a slap shot. He was a normal dad who did something special. He wasn't much of a teacher when it came to hockey. He wanted us to watch him and to do what he did. He was a typical dad. Nothing was good enough."

And then, for Brett, 14, nothing was all there was. "A violent divorce," Brett says, his sighing shrug announcing no desire to elaborate. "My parents hated each other."

The antagonism was evidently so consuming that Bobby Hull chose to exclude several of his children, along with his former wife, from much of the next decade of his life. According to Brett's mother, Bobby never called his son, never wrote. His rare personal appearances at home often as not ended up messily, the police required at least once.

"I often wonder whether it was any deprivation at all, not having a father around," Joanne says. "Brett was fairly well used to not having a dad because Bobby wasn't ever around that much to begin with. But I went to see a psychologist when we moved to Vancouver. He helped me understand what the size of the loss must have been for Brett. It was a dual blow -- the loss of a father and the loss of a great sports figure for a kid who loved the sport himself."